No Sorrow Like Separation (The Commander Book 5) Read online

  He had thought things through and made his decision. Instead of answering, he handed the Skinner the official letter. She read it and handed it back to him.

  “Those old Crows are just as bad as the old Focuses,” the Skinner said. She rubbed her temples. “Motherfucking puppetmasters. What do you want to do, Gilgamesh?”

  “After Carol recovers, I need to do this mission.”

  Keaton shook her head. “I was in withdrawal for two hours under the FBI’s tender care. I never fully recovered.” Pause. “I’m still working on it. I don’t like those little episodes any more than anyone else does.”

  Her psychotic breaks. He had pushed those out of his mind; even thinking about them brought up the panic.

  “So, ma’am, when should I do it?”

  “I don’t know yet, kiddo. However…” Keaton gave him her damned sardonic grin that meant she was about to verbally sucker punch him again. “I’ve got my own mission for you, for tomorrow. You and Hancock are going to visit my West Coast Focus. She assures me she can help Hancock. I won’t be there.”

  He met the Skinner’s eyes. Yes. This was no joke. This was a test – had he learned enough from the Skinner’s lessons to cope with a Focus?

  He worried that even with all his progress, he still hadn’t lived up to the Skinner’s expectations. Despite the panic inherent in the task, he saw no way to refuse.

  Keaton studied him. “Make that the day after tomorrow.”

  “Tell me what to do, ma’am,” he said.

  Carol Hancock: April 11, 1968

  In the end, we drove with the radio off and Gilgamesh behind the wheel.

  We also started with Gilgamesh behind the wheel, the radio playing soft jazz, and me curled up in the back seat, emotionally drained. The previous day’s exercises and whatever internal healing I still did had dropped my juice count much lower than should be normal for a single day of work. I also had no sense for my juice count, or even what numbers meant. I knew a count of 125 meant ‘fun’ and ‘good times’, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what a count of 114 had to do with a count of 125. Of all my mental problems, this one annoyed me the most. Anyway, Keaton thought 114 meant I should be doing fine. I certainly didn’t feel fine. Gilgamesh said I leaked dross like a sieve whenever I exercised. He also said my glow was fragile. I think those two had something to do with each other, but cause and effect had turned into a random function for me. Now if I only knew what a function was, I would be fine. The whole damned world had turned into magic.

  I started to miss Keaton by the time we got a quarter mile away from her mansion. A different sort of magic. At first Gilgamesh’s driving felt fine, until we got on the freeway and headed south. No longer fine. The soft music grated on my nerves. Eventually I gave up on my moping and sat up, too curious.

  Gilgamesh drove safely, at the freeway’s minimum speed. Vehicles zoomed past us, and whenever one pulled in front of us our car pulled back, as if the car itself was afraid. I breathed down his neck and gave terse one word advice that only made my Crow agitated. I told him I wanted to drive, probably not clearly, as I conveyed my desires one noun or verb at a time; he ignored me but I kept badgering until he gave in.

  My driving was better, save the vehicles around me slowed down and started honking their horns at me. Gently nudging the other vehicles out of my way also elicited horn honks. I found a jangly country station I liked and cranked up the radio volume. Gilgamesh’s hands, already tightly gripped on whatever car surface he found, gripped tighter. Soon he began to sweat. Not much later, his eyes closed and he started to moan. He didn’t start barking at me, though, until after I decided to beep the horn in time with the music.

  This ended up with Gilgamesh behind the wheel again. Somehow, my driving hurt him. I couldn’t have that, even if I didn’t understand why. The radio stayed off, though.

  He told stories about his life. I liked his stories. He appeared worried when I told him to repeat them, though.

  Gilgamesh found Focus Lupe Rodriguez’s place soon after sunset in whatever absurdly large city Focus Rodriguez lived in. The sky didn’t look healthy. The air was foul to breathe, too. Also, a whole bunch of cars had decided to occupy the streets for no particular reason and the traffic sucked as well. Gilgamesh assured me these facts were related, but I was having none of that.

  Focus Rodriguez’s place was a dump but fit in with her community, which Gilgamesh named East Los Angeles. I couldn’t place the town into my mental map, but I provisionally put it next to South Dakota. It didn’t feel right to put the town east of South Carolina. The place crawled with anti-war protestors, demonstrations, local toughs wearing brown berets, police, and even one small detachment of National Guard troops. Something about a Chicano Blowout during my incarceration last month.

  We stopped in front of Focus Rodriguez’s place, a dry cleaners next to a boarded up hardware store under renovations. I got out of the car, sniffed the air and found the sidewalk covered with juice traces.

  Oooh. Juice. For me? Gilgamesh shouted something that sounded like “Stop” but I rushed into the dry cleaners, through the dry cleaners and into the back room, which wasn’t a dry cleaners back room but somebody’s living room or common room. People scattered, guns came out, Gilgamesh shouted some warning about an out of control Arm (which induced me to glance around, almost interrupting my stalk, but I didn’t see another Arm). As I glanced around, I lost the ability to metasense juice traces or juice, so I stopped. Strange.

  The lights went out in my head and I hit the ground.

  Gilgamesh: April 11, 1968

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Gilgamesh said, trying to get a word in edgewise. “I’d already brought her out of her stalk.”

  Two Transforms held him, one on his left arm and one on his right. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen so many drawn weapons in his life. His Spanish was minimal at best, rusty to boot, heavily accented Cuban, and he didn’t even bother polluting the air with it here. This wasn’t Miami and the accent here just sounded wrong. Which left a problem as nobody else spoke English.

  Unlike her people, Icon (the Crow name for Focus Rodriguez) wasn’t the least bit flustered. Slowly but surely, one calm order and one finger point at a time, she directed her people elsewhere. In a moment, no guns pointed at him at all.

  Jewelry and ornaments, all bedecked with what had to be juice patterns, covered the Focus. One silver cross in Icon’s left hand held his full attention, something about the juice pattern on it shrieking ‘danger’ to him at an instinctive level he wasn’t at all comfortable with.

  He controlled his panic and didn’t flee, although following the Skinner’s advice he kept Carol and one other person between him and the Focus. Which didn’t appear to help the situation much, as he needed to move the two beefy guys who held him, which they found disconcerting. His movement did quiet his panic, though.

  “I metasensed that, and I thank you,” Focus Rodriguez said, in English. She had no problem picking out his voice amid her panicked mob. “One jostle from my people would have set her off in some other way. I had to drop her.”

  Probably right.

  Icon eventually quieted her people and chased away her Transforms, leaving five normal and well-armed bodyguards with her. She sat down beside Tiamat and he joined her on the dirty floor, after straightening his new suit (purchased for this meeting, at the Skinner’s orders).

  There was no mistaking that Icon wasn’t an ordinary dirt-poor daughter of the barrio. She wore a black hooded cloak over a dark brown dress. Dark garnet and gold rings adorned her fingers, dark beads were woven into her hair, and a prominent pewter cross hung around her neck. Her skin possessed a flawless golden smoothness even actresses couldn’t achieve in real life. She was lean and healthy, with the muscle tone of an athlete. Despite the fact that she looked nineteen, she possessed the confident firmness of someone much older.

  “Arm Keaton was correct,” Focus Rodriguez said, after examining Tiamat for
a minute. “Arm Hancock’s juice structure is a disaster.”

  “We thought we had that fixed, ma’am,” Gilgamesh said.

  Icon looked him over. Disconcerting. This was no low-end Focus; she was plenty dark and her glow exuded ample strength. “Then neither Crow nor Arm metasense is good enough to pick up the real damage. She can speak?” Focus Rodriguez spoke with a strong accent, not a native English speaker.

  “One or two words at a time.”

  The Focus bit her lower lip. “Bad. The problem, though, is not physical. It’s mental, psychological. Arm Keaton was right to suspect this problem. I can help.”

  This was the cue the Skinner had warned him to look for: time to offer the envelope with the payment. He did so and the Focus leafed through the money in the envelope to make sure the agreed upon price was there. One part of him sneered at the mercantile aspects of the exchange, but a larger, more empathic part of him saw ‘huge Transform household, nearly all unemployable because they are Transforms’, and understood the significance of Keaton’s payment.

  “We’ll bring her conscious, without your strange spell that turned off her metasense,” Focus Rodriquez said. Gilgamesh nodded and cleaned off the rotten egg effect, not commenting that his trick wasn’t a spell. The Skinner said his rotten egg effect wasn’t good enough to fool a mature Arm, but in Tiamat’s current condition, his trick would be more than adequate. The Skinner had been right.

  Icon touched Carol with a piece of costume jewelry. Carol sat up a moment later, radiating hostility until she found Gilgamesh. She forced herself to relax. Somewhere inside her was the real Tiamat. The real Tiamat wanted out. Carol wasn’t comfortable with the Tiamat part of herself yet.

  He did find himself quite intrigued by this Focus, the only one he had ever seen or metasensed who worked analogously to the way he worked. She studied him just as intently. He suspected she never before had a Crow to examine up close. Panic bubbled up, but his hard-earned lessons from the Skinner paid off and he redirected it toward a thorough examination of his tactical situation. Which sucked, but the attention he paid to his situation worked its magic, and diminished his panic. He put some work into visualizing Icon as a person, not as the difficult Focus portrayed in the Crow letters.

  “Focus?” Carol said.

  Focus Rodriguez nodded. “I can’t help you directly, Arm Hancock. It doesn’t lie within my powers to physically heal; nor can I modify your juice structure. However, I can show you where the problem is and you should be able to do something about your problem yourself.”

  “Cool.”

  “Stare at this and talk to me as best you can,” the Focus said. She took off her pewter cross and held it in front of Carol’s eyes, which turned vacant.

  “Okay. Shiny. Cross. Fingers. Juice.”

  “Bad things were done to you. They were bad, but you are strong. You are not imprisoned any more, you can face them.”

  “Bad things. Bad juice. Bad Focuses.”

  “Right there,” Focus Rodriquez said. Gilgamesh couldn’t metasense the slightest bit of what Icon did; whatever she did remained too complex for him to understand and used so little juice that all he could sense was a faint ‘something’ in front of Carol. “Right there you made the problem go away, the memories of your imprisonment, and it took you with them.”

  “Cruel bitches. Pain. Lots.”

  “You want yourself back?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Then you must fix what I am showing you.”

  “Afraid.”

  Gilgamesh took Carol’s hands in his. She smiled, appreciating what little comfort he could give.

  “Fear means this is important, not that you shouldn’t do it,” Focus Rodriquez said.

  Carol leaned forward until the cross nearly lay on her nose. Gilgamesh sensed her concentration build and metasensed the juice churn inside her. She burned juice internally again, the trick that still confused the Skinner. Carol’s burn went on and on, then stopped with a shriek from Carol. She thrashed away from Focus Rodriguez and himself, bucked and shrieked her way across the floor and over to a wall, where she huddled up into a fetal ball, hands over her eyes, moaning.

  “¿De dónde ir el Cuervo…oh, there you are,” Focus Rodriguez said. Gilgamesh had panicked and hidden himself on the other side of the common room, behind a cabinet, a confuse metasense rotten egg in his hand. The Focus studied him, now wary. She hadn’t considered him even the slightest threat beforehand.

  “She’s dangerous in this state,” Gilgamesh said. Tiamat’s glow settled into a new pattern; her emotions roiled with fear, anger, hostility and aggression.

  “Not to you she isn’t. Her real self is back and despite appearances, she is in control. Crow, she needs you.”

  “Ma’am,” Gilgamesh said. He suspected Icon could parse his glow as easily as she parsed Tiamat’s. Her attention made him feel naked.

  He carefully crossed the room, undamping his glow and making sure Tiamat noticed. She raised one hand to him before he got half way across the room, and when he reached her and sat, she buried her head in his lap and hugged him tight enough to nearly break his hips.

  “Focus Biggioni must die,” Tiamat said, her first complete sentence since her ordeal.

  Gilgamesh shivered at the predator in her words.

  Yes, Tiamat was back.

  Chapter 2

  …and the Rev. Loomis has proposed a constitutional amendment banning Transform multi-family households as a way to defend the struggling American family. Now I know that a lot of people have attacked Rev. Loomis as being Transformophobic, but the real issue — and you have to face the facts — is that Transforms choose to live in sin.

  “Hunter Activity Near Chicago and Media Responses”

  Carol Hancock: April 12, 1968

  “The only thing off limits is anything after they turned the lights out on me,” I said. I drove, not at all interested in whatever passed as Gilgamesh’s driving style. I just adjusted how I drove until I found the right place to keep Gilgamesh calm. Magic, but what wasn’t?

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “What Keaton wanted me to do was test your mind. Is this okay?”

  Gilgamesh was a loud ‘Boo!’ from falling apart in utter panic. I worked on quieting myself to be pleasant Carol. Which wasn’t what I wanted to be doing right this instant. Back to myself, or back to having more of myself than before, I wanted to go out and be a predator for a while. A good stalk would quiet my nerves. I was obligated, though, to be pleasant. I wasn’t sure why. More of this ‘logic’ nonsense.

  I went with my gut. “Ask the questions. Let’s see how I do.”

  The answer was: poorly. My memory was back to Arm normal, but as I feared, my grasp on logic hadn’t improved much. I now understood simple ‘if X then Y’ style logic, but anything more complex turned into gibberish. I could do arithmetic in my head but couldn’t connect formulas to objects or concepts. Triangle areas remained beyond me. Oh, and I couldn’t read. I knew this when I figured out that the squiggles on the radio dial and speedometer and the road signs likely meant something.

  After those tests I told Gilgamesh I needed to get out of the car and work off some steam. He didn’t object, but afterwards said that he couldn’t remember me being able to leap as I had when I was bounding around beside the highway. I suspected his observation meant something, so like with many things that meant something I couldn’t understand, I stuck his words away in my memories for later.

  My biggest fear was the size of the tab I was running up with Keaton. At some point she would demand repayment and I had some bad fears about what she might want. The wonderful old phrase “I’ll do anything” haunted my thoughts. I didn’t want to go there again.

  “Carol? I need to talk to you, if that’s okay,” Gilgamesh said. A panicky whisper, barely audible over the steady freeway hum of progress at 75 miles per hour.

  “Sure.” I had hours of driving to go and any distraction would do. Getting my
mind partly fixed had shaken loose a large number of bad memories, all of which I tried to process.

  “I haven’t been talking to you about personal issues, for fear they would upset you, or that you hadn’t recovered enough to, um…” His voice trailed off.

  “Understand? Cope?”

  “Yes.” He took a deep breath. “You need to understand that I’ve wanted to talk to you in a calm setting since the beginning, since St. Louis. Just the fact I’m fulfilling one of my dreams has got me on edge.”

  I was beginning to suspect Crows didn’t think like other human beings. “I understand,” I said. This talk was important to him. He had likely been rehearsing since Keaton grabbed him. Or before.

  “First, I’d like to apologize for not being able to participate in your rescue. I’m just a young Crow.”

  I had to laugh. He could hide from me, find me in the vast expanse of the United States, cope with Keaton and he still needed to apologize. I remembered some of the story. “You got me out of captivity without having to be present. What you did is nothing to apologize for.”

  He appreciated the compliment. “I asked myself ‘what would Carol do?’”

  “You organized the rescue.”

  “As best as possible.” He went on to tell an amazing story of how he had juggled his Crow contacts, Keaton and Rizzari, making sure they all had the information they needed at the right time.

  “What you did is amazing,” I said. “I’m not sure I would have been able to do that.” We eyed each other closely. Part of our relationship was a juice-based love thing, another was that we made damned good resources for each other’s plans.

  In return, I told him about Focus Teas and her schemes. I didn’t think he liked many Focuses, if any.

  Later I sensed him gathering up his courage again. “There’s one personal issue I would like to discuss,” he said.

  Sex. I carefully guarded my reactions and motioned for him to continue. I owed Gilgamesh my life, but so far I hadn’t lived up to my end of the bargain. He loved me, and wanted me, but he held back. In my current position, with no territory, no resources, and half a brain I would accept pretty much whatever he wanted on the subject.